School Volunteers May Be Subject to Background Checks

Parents who help out in the classroom next school year would have to undergo  criminal background checks and carry school district-issued photo IDs, under new rules proposed for volunteers.

Anyone who volunteers at any Menomonee Falls school - even longtime volunteers - would be required to submit an application and agree to a background check.

The policy would apply to hundreds of people who help out in the schools. Background checks would be required for volunteers who help with overnight student activities, work one on one with students and supervise students with limited oversight of a teacher.

Under the new rules, which are still being developed and need School Board approval, each volunteer would be issued a photo identification card that would be valid for four years. Every four years, a new background check would be required to renew the ID.

A third party hired by the district would check to see whether a volunteer had a state or federal criminal record or any misdemeanor arrests, or was on a national list of sexual predators.

Patti Keller, the district's director of human resources, said the background check would be nearly identical to the one conducted before hiring district employees.

Once a volunteer is in the system, the district may randomly conduct further checks if needed, under the policy.

Background checks aren’t new for volunteers. However, the system used by the district wasn’t uniform and procedures varied with different clusters of district volunteers.

For example, the volunteer coordinator at in the used a different third-party background check service to check her group of volunteers.

“We’ve always done them, but we haven’t been as consistent as we should have been,” Keller said. “We want all the procedures to be the same.”

With the new policy, all potential volunteers for the district will be checked through the same third party service. Information for each will be stored in a single district database.

“The biggest challenge will be to have the application out by next year’s registration,” Keller said.

The district's Policy Committee is in the process of refining the language of the new rules. Keller believes the policy will likely be approved by the board, and she plans to send the information to families this summer.

Keller expects about 800 applications from current and potential volunteers to come in at the beginning of next school year.